My dads UFO sighting in 1947. (check the date...)

My dad had been back from the war for some months (occupied Japan), going to school... He got a summer job with the Forest Service in a fire tower
(which to this day, he says is the best job he's ever had...)

The fire-tower, which is no longer there by the bye, was located on the north slopes of Mt. Adams with an incredible view of Mt. Rainier off the the
north. It's 50-55 miles away, roughly...

It was early morning, June 3rd, 1947 (check the date) when my dad spotted five "aircraft" flying across the slopes of Mt. Rainier. He guesstimated the
range at about 45 to fifty miles, height about 10,000 feet, and speed roughly 700 to 800 knots heading east to west.

My dad was, at the time, intimately familiar with the high performance American piston craft in service with the military at the time.

He worked on, in various capacities, P40's, P47's, P51's, P61's (blackwidow's), and P38's. He was a volunteer gunner on numerous occasions on both
B25's (Mitchells), and B24's (Liberators). As both an armourer and a mechanic. He knew these aircraft intimately. The jets were just coming into
service, and none were in the area.

He said it was the speed that caught his attention, and the fact that they were just too shiny.

It was two weeks later that Kenneth Arnold had his famous sighting in the same area...

Were these the same craft? If so, what does this imply? If anything... It's certainly interesting.

Did your father detail the shapes, or was distance too great to resolve anything?

The Arnold Sighting describes vehicles more Crescent-Shaped than Saucer, where saucer sightings of actual reported saucer shapes would seem to imply
false reporting from 'witnesses' in consideration that the whole "Flying Saucer" tag was applied to the Arnold sighting as more of a description of
how the vehicles Arnold claims to have seen flew as opposed to how they appeared.

I've always found the Disc Shaped UFO reports, coming in so soon after the Arnold sighting as UFO-mania became trendy to be somewhat suspect in
consideration that the whole Disc-Shape description that came out of that report was more a misunderstanding in relation to the shape described by
Arnold (edited previous post to include pic).

I'm not saying your father did not see what he say he saw. I just find the Psycho-Social model interesting when modeling concepts and archetypes
played in media against trends in public reporting that seem to indicate a sympathetic unconscious response to media programming.

For instance, had reporting of the Arnold sighting labelled the reported craft as "flying crescents", I suspect we'd have more reports of flying
crescents as opposed to flying saucers.

This isn't to say there isn't a genuine UFO phenomenon.
These early reports, before much of the contamination we see and know today, are more interesting to interrogate due lesser likelihood of media and
social driving/ influence.

Well, if he reported them as "disc shaped" then is it not an identical sighting to Kenneth Arnold. He described them as crescent shaped, with a
convex like tail (see the image of Arnold and his rendition Alice posted above). So, it cannot be a corroboration of Arnold's sighting if he was
adamant they were discs.

It was the press of the day that coined the "flying saucer" term, and after that the shape was fixed in peoples minds as what to expect. It seems
Arnold's description and drawings were either not interesting enough, or (my favorite) nobody cared or bothered to investigate his claim further and
just took the word of the press.

He's never claimed that they were "flying saucers". That's my addition. He told me, on numerous occasions, that he just didn't know what they
were.

Given his experience with that era's aircraft, especially military, I found that telling.

The date, June 3rd, is telling as well, as it predates Arnold's sighting by more than a week. In an ideal world, I'd love to find a report that he
may have filed and forgotten. I've always got the impression that, at the time, he didn't really think much of it, other than the speed they
moved... I think the reason he told the story so often was that I wanted to hear it so often... I've been into UFO's since I was knee high on a
gray alien...

Mostly my own confusion/misremembering... It has been a while since I've heard the tale. Years, in fact. Only reason I'm telling it now is that
my dad isn't doing all that well, he's over 90, and I spent a long holiday weekend with him, and I've been busily remembering, or misremembering
stories that he's told over the years.

I'm hoping in the next couple of months to get a record of some of these stories from him, before it's too late.

seagull, I thank you for sharing the story with us all. That did take intestinal fortitude, and I respect that. I as just trying to clarify your story
so we can perhaps understand its place in history. That said, did he write any of this down at the time at all? That would be refreshing to hear if he
did.

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